by Frances Cha
Despite what I said about not drinking, Nami brings over several bottles of soju, along with a box of fried chicken wings, and says I don’t need to drink, the soju is for her. Her eyes keep darting around nervously until I finally snap at her to stop making me jittery.
We rip into the fried chicken in front of the TV, watching another K-pop special. It defies logic, how many new groups debut every week. The girls sashay and jump frenetically onstage in their miniskirts and knee-high socks. Nami gets up and follows some moves, singing along with a chicken wing for a mic. Her eyes look especially crazed today, glinting like marbles as she flops her head from side to side.
“You’re dripping chicken oil on the floor,” I say. Today’s hangover is not the worst of the week, but it still throbs relentlessly.
Nami sits back down when a has-been male singer, so old—in his late thirties—comes on and starts singing a love ballad.
“I should go soon,” she says, drinking a shot and looking toward the door.
“What? You just got here. What’s wrong with you today?”
She fidgets and hems and haws and then I drag it out of her. She has apparently been sleeping with Hanbin. I blink and blink as she tells me the story.
After I had left with Miho that night, Hanbin woke up and they all drank even more. Nami said she blacked out early, but what she could remember was that at some point there was just her and Hanbin in the room and she was on her knees, blowing him. He couldn’t finish, however, and insisted on going to a hotel next door, where she had blown him some more and then they’d had violent sex and fallen asleep. In the morning, they’d had sex again and then he had insisted on getting her number before she left. He’d been texting her all week to meet up again, and she’d met him yesterday afternoon and they had gone to a hotel again.
I am silent as she tells me this.
“Is he giving you money?” I ask after a long pause. She shakes her head and looks miserable. I reach over for some soju and take a swig straight from the bottle. “I guess I am drinking today.”
Nami dumps the chicken bones into the trash and then sits back down across from me and reaches for another bottle. “You know, this is the first time I’ve slept with someone who isn’t a customer,” she says hesitantly, after she takes a gulp. “But it’s kind of all a dream, like I am watching it happen on TV or something. I mean, I know it’s happening but I can’t really wake up.”
I swirl my glass and hope getting drunk will kill the headache this time. “Do you guys talk and stuff?” I ask. “Or is it just all sex?” I’m curious what he’s like in bed, chaebol boy. Miho never talks about it.
“Yeah, a little,” she says. “He’s really sweet afterward. And he takes me to eat at these really nice restaurants and laughs when I eat a lot.” She crinkles her forehead. “He has a lot of things he has to worry about.”
“Like what?” I say skeptically. “How to sleep with as many girls as possible without paying them?”
“Yesterday, he told me his father has a demon inside of him,” she says.
“A demon? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know—Hanbin oppa kept repeating that, and saying he needs to be exorcised by a mudang. And that his mother has been banished to a basement room of his house.” Nami looks down at the floor.
“He’s known you for two seconds and he is telling you this? That’s so weird.” Especially since Miho had told me that Hanbin doesn’t talk about his father, ever. But then again, all rich kids are weird in their own ways. One guy who was a regular when I was at Miari was always flaunting his money, and once he laid money out on the bed and had me bury my face in it while he fucked me from behind. He had seen it in some movie. That made me think he was probably not that rich, but then again, he did come a few times a week so he could not have been poor.
“You better not be asking me for advice,” I say finally with a sigh.
“I’m not asking you for advice. I just don’t want to go behind your back.” Nami opens another bottle and pours another shot for herself, not even offering me one.
“This is you not going behind my back?” I blink. “But now it is one more thing I have to worry about.”
Nami looks wounded and we are both silent, but then I pull her toward me and hug her. She smells like almond shampoo and cheap perfume. “Did he say anything about Miho?” I ask.
“No,” she says, taking a strand of my hair and twisting it around her finger. “He hasn’t mentioned her once.”
* * *
—
WHEN SHE LEAVES, taking all her trash with her in the little plastic bag that she brought her chicken in, I feel both agitated and weary. A sickly feeling settles across my shoulders like a heavy cape, and no matter what drama or reality show comes on TV, I find my mind wandering. It’s maddening, how I am wasting my day off on a bad mood.
I try to trace the reason for this feeling. It can’t be surprise at Hanbin—first of all, I had fully been expecting him to be an asshole like all the other rich boys with Mom’s Maseratis and Dad’s credit cards. Hadn’t I? It was also not like Miho and I were actual friends anyway. We never talked about anything personal—I don’t think I’d ever talked to her about my father or my sister. It wasn’t like Hanbin was really going to marry her.
The bad mood was probably protectiveness toward Nami, if anything. I couldn’t remember a single time she had ever talked to me about a boy—outside of work, of course. Work never counts—it doesn’t matter how nice a client is. Nami, for all her childishness, knows that by now.
When I hear Miho unlocking the door to her apartment, I stay quiet on my side, hoping she doesn’t come over, but she does. She wanders in and pokes her head into my room as I pretend to be engrossed in my phone.
“What are you doing? Did you eat yet?” she says.
Her hair is in braids wound tightly around her head and there are turquoise paint splotches all over her neck and hands. Her face is guileless and happy, which depresses me.
“Did you not eat all day again?” I say, exasperated.
“You know, I really meant to today—I bought this yogurt and a breakfast roll from that new bakery on the corner of Tehranro, and then I must have left the bag somewhere because when I remembered them this afternoon I couldn’t find them anywhere,” she says. “It’s a mystery.”
She comes in, oblivious to my mood, and sits on the bed, fingering the dress I wore last night. “I like this color,” she says dreamily, running her hands along the hem. The dress is cheap and tight, but I also like the color—a somber slate. None of the other girls like to wear it and it makes me feel as if I am a person of depth.
“Want to go to the aquarium with me?” Miho says abruptly.
“The aquarium? Why?”
“I need to look at fish.”
“For work again, you mean?” I say. Last time, she wanted to look at how duck meat was hung at a Beijing duck restaurant.
She nods. “I’m starting this glass project and it made me think of fish. Hanbin can’t go with me because he has some family thing.”
I roll my eyes, enraged, but she doesn’t see.
“The aquarium on the weekend will be overrun with shrieking children,” I say, pleased at coming up with such a perfect excuse not to go. “Hundreds of children in an enclosed dark space.” I shudder. “Sounds like a horror movie.”
Miho looks irked.
“But you should go,” I say hastily. “Feed your brain. And maybe all those children will inspire you too. I’ve heard that children do that sometimes.”
She looks at me. “Do you know that all these ob-gyns and birthing centers and postpartum centers are going out of business because nobody is having children? I heard that on the radio news today.”
“Good riddance,” I say. “Why would you want to bring more children into this world so that they can
suffer and be stressed their entire lives? And they’ll disappoint you and you will want to die. And you’ll be poor.”
“I want four kids,” she says, grinning.
That’s because you’re dating a rich boy, I want to say to her. But really, you should know that he’s never going to marry you.
“No surgery will be able to fix your vagina after that,” I say instead. “You really want to pee every time you sneeze?”
* * *
—
IT’S TRUE, THOUGH. Other than Miho, no one I know wants to have children. Least of all me. Just the thought of getting pregnant makes my blood pressure shoot up.
When my mother was my age, my sister, Haena, was already six and I was three—a fact that my mother reminds us of every time we see her.
“You don’t have to be ready before you have children, you just have them and then they will grow up one way or the other,” she pleads to us and to Haena especially, since she thinks Haena is still married. “Who will take care of you when you are old? Look at me, what would my life be without you?”
She doesn’t understand that I will never have the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of another life when I am scrambling like a madman in my own. It’s why I buy ten boxes of birth control pills at a time from the pharmacy. Miho told me once that in America, they don’t sell birth control over the counter and you need a doctor to prescribe it. And to see a doctor, you can’t just walk in—you have to schedule an appointment days or even weeks in advance. A lot of the things she tells me about America puzzle me because it is so different from how I imagine it to be. I suspect there might have been a lot of miscommunication while she was there. She probably didn’t understand much of what anyone said to her. I’ve heard her speak English before and it didn’t sound that fluent.
Miho herself doesn’t use the pills because she says they affect her moods and her work too much. That and she’s afraid they’ll prevent her from being able to get pregnant in the future. I told her I hope that’s true—for me, I mean.
I’m lucky, though, I haven’t had to have an abortion yet because I’m so punctual with taking my pills. It doesn’t matter how drunk I get the night before, or even if I am drinking during the day. I’ve set a daily alarm on my phone and even if my battery is dead my body remembers. I wake up from sleeping like the dead right before it’s time for me to take one.
I know a girl—she was a few years older than me—who worked at Ajax but quit because her sponsor wanted her to. She got a fancy apartment and had two babies. The last I’d heard was that she lost her mind and was shipped off to the mental hospital.
I think of her, and I think of Miho and Nami and Haena, and then I go to my fridge and take out a grape vinegar drink and go to the cupboard for soju. Mixing them together, I start drinking, sitting down on the floor in front of the window that looks out onto the street.
I don’t know, I have half a mind to move to Hong Kong or New York like a few of the older girls I used to work with, who told me they found jobs in room salons there. Apparently the standards of beauty are very low in those cities and people walk around with all kinds of ugly faces. “You should come too!” they said, as if it was an adventure instead of forced retirement. They gave me their contact information but they didn’t even respond when I wrote asking what their new lives are like.
Who knows? Maybe someone will marry me if I move there. A foreign man who will think I was born beautiful, because he cannot tell the difference.
Wonna
This is the fourth time I’ve gotten pregnant this year and I already know that this one is not going to make it either.
I have not told my husband yet about this conviction—he would just say, “Thoughts become seeds for bad luck!” or something else inane, and try to change the subject.
It wasn’t like I had an ominous dream or anything—I just know. A motherly intuition if you will—or the opposite.
In the waiting room of my doctor, three other pregnant women are shifting uncomfortably because of their swollen bellies. None are “glowing”—they all look puffy and tired. Two of them have dragged their husbands here with them—I don’t understand why they subject the men to such a waste of time. I never let my own husband come even though he always says he wants to. “Just concentrate on making more money, please,” I say, all polite, and he shuts up like a clam. It’s difficult enough to be a midlevel employee with a middling paycheck as it is, without taking time off to go to your wife’s obstetrician visit. “I don’t understand why you want me to have a baby when we won’t be able to pay for childcare,” I used to say to him before I started trying so desperately to have one. “I won’t be able to afford to work, or not work.”
My bright husband always has an unfailingly asinine answer for such practical questions—“All we need to do is have one and we’ll figure it out! Our parents will help!”
I see him sometimes, with his plain, happy-go-lucky smile, and feel my heart wrenching in such pained dislike that I have to look down so that he won’t catch the expression on my face. He is a kind man, if nothing else, and I always have to remind myself that marrying him was my choice. All my adult life, and in my marriage, I am trying not to be cruel because I know that it is only a matter of time before what is in my blood rears its ugly head.
“Ms. Kang Wonna,” the nurse calls, and I’m ushered into the doctor’s pink office, plastered with black-and-white photos of babies and uterus renderings. The doctor behind the desk is a plump little middle-aged woman with round glasses and permed hair.
“This is your first visit with us? And your chart says you are four weeks pregnant?” she says, fiddling with her glasses as she reads my chart. “How are you feeling?”
I consider the question.
“I have a bad feeling,” I say, then stop.
“You are experiencing pain, you mean?” She looks appropriately concerned.
“Not yet,” I say. “But I can tell it’s coming.”
She raises an eyebrow and I try to explain.
“I can feel something bad is going to happen to the baby. It’s just a feeling—like a sinking. The doctor I was going to before didn’t listen to me, so here I am.” I say that last part to warn her to be careful of her words, but I am not sure if she understands me.
She looks back down at my chart.
“I see that you have had three previous pregnancies?”
“Yes.”
“And you miscarried them all?”
“Yes.”
The doctor taps her chart.
“I understand why you would be apprehensive this time around,” she says slowly, “but I want you to know that miscarriages are extremely common so you shouldn’t feel like it’s just something that happens to you. A lot of women miscarry and it’s no one’s fault. Of course, if you wish, we can run some tests to make sure all is well but I’d like to ask you some more questions first.”
She continues to ask uninteresting questions about my physical and mental state and past and I answer them automatically.
“Given everything you have gone through, do you think you may want to speak to a therapist?” she asks. It’s my turn to raise my eyebrow.
“Doesn’t that mean I lose my insurance?” I say. “I heard that if you get mental treatment, you get dropped and then no insurance company will touch you after that.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s true still,” she says uncertainly. “But I actually don’t know for certain. You’d have to call your insurance, I suppose.”
“Yeah, no,” I say. Even if I had money to waste, it’s not like I’m having suicidal thoughts or anything. I knew I shouldn’t have brought up this premonition. I don’t know why I expected something different from this doctor.
She looks at the clock. “Why don’t we go ahead and do an ultrasound.” She turns to the nurse, who guides m
e to the examining table, where I quickly pull down my underwear and hoist my feet into the stirrups. The doctor rolls a lubricated condom down onto the ultrasound rod thing and gently pushes it into me, probing while we both look at the screen.
“Lights, please.” The nurse dims the lights and the doctor keeps searching for something while telling me to relax. After a good five minutes of probing, she pulls out the rod and takes her gloves off one by one.
“Well, it’s too early to see anything at all, so why don’t you come back next week and we can take another look for the sac and the heartbeat. We’ll take some blood today and run some tests. Don’t worry in the meantime. Either way, you’ll be fine.”
“Yes, I know,” I say, putting my clothes back on as fast as I can. I don’t say anything else to her and stalk out the door, trying not to look at the swollen women in the waiting room.
* * *
—
I KNOW IT’S CRAZY, but I took the entire day off for this doctor’s appointment today—Department Head Lee said, “God, what is it now?” in his sharpest voice when I told him last week. He kept asking the specific reason, but I held out to the last. “Just a personal day,” I said, looking down at his shiny brown shoes, and that’s when he proceeded to rap me on the head with a rolled-up sheaf of paper. “As everyone knows, this is why women can’t advance,” he said in a loud voice for the entire department to hear, then told me to get out of his sight.
I’d debated whether to take just a half day but it was the thought of my hour-and-a-half commute that decided it for me. So I am sitting in a bakery café on Garosugil, gloriously alone, biting into a buttery almond croissant and flicking crumbs off a scarf I just bought at the boutique on the corner. I don’t know what possessed me to buy this scarf—we are so strapped for money as it is—but it’s been a while since I bought anything and it looked so chic on the mannequin in the window. Now that I have it on, I can see that the fabric is cheap and the ends are unraveling already. Like everything else in my life, the impulsive choice—the wrong choice.
